`Pocahontas' In Tune With The Indian Way

July 22, 1995|By JAMES D. DAVIS Religion Editor

Walt Disney Pictures has long been a kind of barometer for prevailing morality, even spirituality. Jiminy Cricket told Pinocchio to "let your conscience be your guide."Monks walked reverently through a cathedrallike grove in Fantasia. Prince Charming showed Sleeping Beauty that love is stronger than death.

And Pocahontas, Disney's newest animated work, pays homage to current interest in Indian religion. The 17th century native Americans idyllically harvest, fish, canoe and commune with nature. The English colonists, by contrast, dig, chop, shoot and apparently never pray.

The film has the ringing endorsement of Russell Means, an Indian activist and actor who supplies the voice of Pocahontas' father, Powhatan. "It tells the truth about the Indian people," he said during a screening last month in Plantation. "It shows them as three-dimensional, even four-dimensional, people. And [it tells the truth) about why the Europeans came here."

The world of ancient Virginia in Pocahontas is a mystical habitat of blues and greens and mauves - repeating the forest-cathedral effect of 1943's Fantasia. Pocahontas' veillike black hair itself flows and billows like an element of nature. She talks to animals, and the wind whirls around her, carrying barely audible voices.

Her closest confidante is Grandmother Willow, a tree spirit, who counseled her mother before her. "There are spirits in the rocks, in the creatures, in the water, the earth, the stars," she tells Pocahontas.

Pocahontas repeats this to Capt. John Smith in the film's most popular tune, Colors of the Wind: "I know every rock and tree and creature/Has a life, has a spirit, has a name."She later introduces him to her arboreal spirit guide.

The natural forces give Pocahontas and her fellow Indians unusual powers. She has prophetic dreams full of symbolism. The village medicine man speaks spells into the council fire, and menacing images of the approaching Europeans loom in the smoke.

But the Indians' view of the newcomers is less enlightened than their view of nature. "These men are not like us; they prowl the earth like ravenous wolves," the medicine man tells the chief, in an effort by Disney to show that prejudice comes in more than one color. Later the Indians and Europeans, preparing for battle, sing in counterpoint in the song Savages.

Tolerance - and the consequences of not practicing it - is one of the film's main themes, right down to the Romeo-Juliet climax when Pocahontas throws herself over Smith's body to prevent his execution.

Religious reviewers accordingly seem rather tolerant themselves of the pro-pagan themes in Pocahontas. Ted Baehr, editor of the Christian-oriented magazine Movieguide in Atlanta, says it didn't strike him as a "propaganda film" like 20th Century Fox's 1992 animated film FernGully, which he felt promoted Earth worship. In Pocahontas, "the religious aspects are very thin, like the film itself. They're trying to show both sides of Indians and whites."

Director Michael Gabriel says the religious content was more in the vein of seeing things through Native American eyes. Even Smith's dialogue with the tree spirit was a way of "showing he was a changed man, who saw Indians as more than mud-dwelling heathen," Gabriel says.

"We didn't intend to sell Indian beliefs to the children of the world; we were trying to depict their heritage accurately," he continues. "We wanted to see what animation could bring to the beliefs that would be true to them.

"I like the idea of a kid seeing Pocahontas, then walking through a forest and looking a little longer at a tree. Not just as something to turn into paper, but with respect for its life."